A MOUNTAIN VIEW: Beneath the surface

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

Be praised my Lord for Sister Water, because she shows great use and humbleness and preciousness and depth.
—St. Francis of Assisi

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers; streaming through all our bodies, the salty seas.
—Mohawk Prayer, tr: Gary Snyder

We are dealing with a finite system. The general perception needs to be changed to understand that we’re not groundwater-rich.
—Scott Bruce, Virginia DEQ

What do you consider your community’s most lucrative economic engine? Manufacturing? Real estate? Health Care? Tourism?
These and the communities generating them would literally dry up like a Dust Bowl ghost-town without their most valuable (and undervalued) resource: water.
So what’s your locale’s biggest water resource? Maybe the New River? The Roanoke? South Holston? A backup like Claytor Lake or Spring Hollow Reservoir?
The correct answer: “none of the above.” All of “the below.” The biggest water reserve, anywhere, lies beneath our feet, our buildings and parking lots, in the underground water table.
What keeps it supplied? Rain—if there is any, and if it can reach the underground.
My last two columns walked over the surface of the landscape all around us—the streets and gardens, driveways and rooftops—to help us realize that these comprise one vast catchment for rainfall. Does that catchment welcome the rain down into the local water table—or shunt it off in torrents, down creeks and rivers to a Gulf or Bay that doesn’t need these storm-water baptisms?
At one time, before our region was originally logged and developed, nearly every inch of rain got plugged back into the water table—via a vast shady forest with perhaps some Indian corn patches and open glades here and there. A natural “sponge” of leaf-mat, humus, moss and forest debris—along with the deep roots of wildflowers, vines and trees—slowed run-off and evaporation, allowing water to seep slowly down into the water table.
So when European settlers came to this continent, they found it rich in groundwater, just a few spade-blades under the surface. Many homesteads didn’t even need a well, as springs and creeks were also plentiful and plenty full.
The Holston, Roanoke, New River and others also retained healthy flows because their average water flow comes from creeks—which come from springs, which come from that underground water supply of stored-up rains.
Many folks assume that if a river has low-flows, a couple days of steady rain (currently a historic phenomenon) would fill up the volume and solve the problem.
But a river’s nature is to flow—not stand still. Today’s stormwater is often gone by tomorrow.
Moreover, two days of steady rain—once a normal, welcomed event—now creates brief, instant floods and “natural” disasters in our mountains, where increased deforestation and development have created landscapes that can’t even absorb water from a single thunderstorm.
“We get these big thunderstorms and 90 percent of the water runs off and doesn’t soak into the ground,” says well-driller Charles Falwell. “It’s good for lakes, but it’s not worth a heck for the aquifer.”
Even communities dependent on lakes—generally dammed-up rivers, whose levels do climb from temporary deluges of storm-water—have to face issues of stormwater pollution (motor oil, car-wash detergents, animal feces) and the same longterm issues of groundwater loss as everyone else.
A gander at the growing clay pot around a sinking Smith Mountain Lake, or Atlanta’s Lake Lanier, drives home the point.
The Chattahoochee River, which forms Lake Lanier, relies on groundwater springs and their creeks for its steady volume. Higher groundwater levels require decent rainfall in the long run; it’s true; but a vast landscape of asphalt development has long helped keep even normal precipitation from recharging the water table—not just above Atlanta but up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
The water-squabbles between lake-rim residents, around Lanier and Smith Mountain Lake, and the folks downstream who’d like their fish to live, may seem “trivial” to us from a distance—as long as we have water in a 450-foot well and the nearest river has not been sucked dry by increased demands on the water table and its decreased input.
But when you realize that just south of us, TVA’s electric rates had to jump, for lack of “dam power generation” and the resultant need for more coal-burning, and Alabama’s nuclear plants are uncertain of Lanier’s water for their coolant, and the dwindling Appalachicola downstream from Lanier means dying fish and drying-up recreation dollars—and that no one really knows where residential water might come from if Lanier dries up—you realize that groundwater is far more valuable to the economy than oil—whose price-per-barrel we seem pressed to discuss daily.
Next week, we’ll look at ways to plug rain (should any decide to fall) back into the local landscape, to help recharge our own most valuable economic asset.
Liza Field teaches, writes and plants trees in Wytheville.